“I’ve been okay.” She clearly doesn’t want to get into it.
“I try not to think about it too much.” It’s cowardly to refer to Sedge and his mother’s murders as it. “Sorry,” he says, not exactly sure what he’s apologizing for—maybe the past itself. “I didn’t mean to—”
“It’s okay.” She says it sincerely—a forgiveness.
“Cap, look at these.” Bradwell points at the maps on the floor.
El Capitan takes a look—Helmud too, leaning over his shoulder. “You do these?” El Capitan asks Partridge.
“Lyda’s helped,” he says. “They’re not perfect at all, but I thought they might help one day if . . .”
“Is that what it’s like inside?” El Capitan kneels down, wincing. What did they battle to get here?
“We’re not done with them yet,” Partridge explains.
“Why are you here?” Lyda asks.
“Everything’s turned,” Pressia says.
“Turned?” Partridge says.
Bradwell unstraps one of the Black Boxes from his back and places it near the power source that works the Christmas lights, which immediately dim. “We’ve got things to tell you and questions to ask.”
“And”—Pressia glances around, unsure how to start—“this is Wilda.” The girl looks up. She isn’t a Pure. There’s something off about her that he can’t pinpoint.
Bradwell sits down, rubs his hands together. “Dome worshippers found her near the woods. They say Special Forces dropped her there.”
El Capitan picks at dried blood on his pant leg.
“What the hell’s going on? Special Forces?” Partridge asks.
“I was led to the girl by a Special Forces soldier.” El Capitan looks pale. “He wrote a kind of message. Just one word: Hastings.”
“Hastings?” Partridge says.
“As in Silas Hastings?” Lyda asks Partridge.
“You know him?” El Capitan says.
“He was my roommate,” Partridge says. “Jesus, they got to Hastings! How bad off was he?”
El Capitan rubs one of his knees as if it’s aching him. “Still very human. I could still see the real person in his eyes.” And then he asks, “Is Hastings trustworthy?”
“He wasn’t the toughest or the most reliable, but he’s loyal.” He imagines Hastings at the dance, tall and awkward, chatting up some girl. “The enhancements change people, but if he can, he’ll help.”
“We’ll need all the help we can get,” El Capitan says.
“What’s wrong?” Partridge asks. “Help with what?”
Pressia says, “Wilda has a New Message from the Dome—from your father.”
“My father? How do you know that?” He knows he sounds a little defensive.
“It has the same structure as the first Message,” El Capitan says. “Twenty-nine words and the cross with the circle.”
“The Celtic cross,” Lyda says. “It’s Irish.”
“Special Forces took her into the Dome,” El Capitan says. “Wiped her clean.”
Partridge grabs a pole overhead and sits down. “Wiped her clean?”
“She was a wretch,” Pressia says.
“Jesus,” Partridge says, “they have what they need, don’t they? If my father can reverse the effects of fusings, he can rebuild himself. He’s probably already regenerated his own cells. I did this experiment with the vials.” He untucks his shirt and shows them the vials strapped around him. “They’re dangerous, like my mother said, but if my father can . . .” He leans forward, looking at the girl’s perfect skin. “If he can do this, he can fix himself, right?” He looks at all of them. “He can live forever!”
“No,” Pressia says. She holds out her hand and lays the girl’s hand on hers, flat. It shakes. The girl already has a palsy, like his father’s. “She’s young. Remember why our mother could protect only one strand of your coding? And why she couldn’t dose me at all? I was just a year and a half younger.”
Partridge nods. It was too dangerous but he doesn’t want to say this in front of the girl. She looks scared enough as it is.
“Enhancements in the Dome don’t start on boys until they’re seventeen,” Lyda says. “For girls, it can be even later.”
“Rapid Cell Degeneration,” Partridge says. The younger you are when you get enhanced, the worse the effects. His father started young—in his teens—and has kept up heavy brain enhancements for decades. The girl is only, what? Nine years old? She’s already shaking. How long will she last? Months, weeks, days? “How could he do this?” Partridge’s chest goes hot with fury.
“He doesn’t know how to reverse the side effects,” El Capitan says.
“If he ever figures that out,” Pressia says, “he could save his own life, and . . .” She glances at Bradwell. She doesn’t have to finish. Partridge gets it. He could undo all their fusings, make them all Pures, with no downsides.
“All I know is she’s a messenger,” Bradwell says. “One who your father knew would get our attention.”
“What’s the Message?” Lyda asks.
The girl buries her head in Pressia’s arm. “It’s okay. You don’t have to do it.”
El Capitan says, “We want our son returned. This girl is proof that we can save you all. If you ignore our plea, we will kill our hostages, one at a time.” He then draws a Celtic cross on his chest with his finger.
“Where are they getting hostages?” Lyda asks.
Bradwell sighs and says, “They’ve sent robotic spiders into the city that have lodged in people’s bodies—they’re hostages. If we don’t hand Partridge over, they’ll keep detonating the spiders, killing people.”
“They’ve already started?” Partridge asks Pressia.
She nods.
So this is what no one wanted to tell him. He feels a little lightheaded. Lyda makes a small sound. Has she started to cry? He refuses to look at her. If it weren’t for him, she’d be living a quiet life in the Dome, making Christmas pot holders.
“They’re crawling all over the city. We saw one detonate. The person exploded. Gone—just gone!” El Capitan winces as if the memory pains him. “And another one was found dead in the woods.”
“Gone!” Helmud says.
“The Dome followers have gone nuts over the girl. They think she’s holy,” Bradwell says.
“She looks Pure,” Lyda says, gazing at Wilda.
“Why do we have to keep using that word?” Bradwell mutters under his breath.
Pressia shoots him a look.
“They’re offering salvation and damnation in one fell swoop.” El Capitan leans over with his elbows on his knees. He and Helmud both look pale with a glaze of sweat and caked ash.
Partridge bends down in front of the girl. “Did they put you in a kind of body cast? Did they put medicine in your body through tubes?”
The girl nods and makes the sign of the cross and its circle on her chest.
“Did it go exactly the way they wanted it to?”
She shakes her head.
“What went wrong?” Partridge asks.
Wilda looks at Pressia. She takes her hand and presses it to her stomach, then glides it back and forth. Pressia touches the girl’s stomach then pulls her hand back instinctively. “They healed too much of her.” She looks up at Partridge. “She has no navel.”
A shiver shoots down Partridge’s spine. The subway car is silent for a moment. Wilda hugs Pressia, who holds her close.
Finally, Bradwell turns to Partridge and says, “Are you going to give yourself up?”
Partridge remembers the feeling he had when his mother told him that there was a secret group of people in the Dome awaiting word from the swan to revolt, to put Partridge in a position of power. He was the one supposed to lead from within. Would going back into the Dome be an admission of defeat? Or would it be his chance to lead—like his mother thought he could? He wants to take down his father, yes, and at least give people a chance to choose a better life. But does he have it
in him to lead? Where would he even begin?
Lyda starts to cry. “He can’t turn himself in. There has to be a way around it. Maybe someone can talk to his father.”
“Right, talk to his father. Because he’s such a reasonable man,” Bradwell says sarcastically.
“She doesn’t want to send Partridge on a suicide mission,” Pressia says. “Fair enough.”
Bradwell runs his hand through his hair, frustrated. “If anyone can think of an alternative, I’m all ears. But it better be quick.”
No one says a word.
“It’s not a suicide mission. Willux won’t kill him,” El Capitan says. “If he wanted him dead, he’d have blown us all up by now. One thing Willux knows is destruction.”
Partridge looks at Lyda, who reaches out and squeezes Partridge’s hand so tightly that their palms become hot. With her by his side, he could do it, couldn’t he? This feels like fate. No way around it. “I wish I’d finished the maps,” Partridge says. “There are some more details, crucial ones. You’ll need the points of entrance through the air-filtration system. More on how Lyda got out, that loading dock she saw. The way in. If I had more time, I could get them down.”
“More time . . .” El Capitan says, his voice trailing off.
“Time,” Helmud says.
“And we need you to look at the box,” Bradwell says. “Do you remember the names of the Seven?”
“Do we have time for this?” Pressia says. “We have to get him aboveground and to Special Forces as fast as possible.”
“If we ever bring down the Dome, it will save lives,” Bradwell says. “Don’t you get it?”
El Capitan looks awful—gaunt and pained. He furrows his brow and lets out a slow, jagged breath. “Sometimes people are willing to sacrifice their lives for the greater good,” he says. “We can’t ask them to, but the truth is, some of them will say, Let’s at least have a fighting chance. Mark down the points of interest, and take a look at the box. It all matters.”
LYDA
SNOW GLOBE
LYDA PASSES THE BLACK BOX to Partridge, gently, like a baby—or maybe more like a bomb. Bradwell’s explaining how the other five Black Boxes are identical encyclopedias, really—massive libraries of information. But this one’s different. “Flip it,” he says.
Partridge turns it over, and Lyda runs a finger over a small symbol.
“The others have serial numbers, but this one has a copyright,” Bradwell says, “without a date.”
“It could be a lot of things,” Pressia says. “Let them come at it with open minds.”
“Or the symbol for pi,” Partridge says. “Three point one four. In a circle.”
Lyda wonders what this means. Pie? In a circle? It’s likely one of the many things the academy teaches boys but not girls.
“Whatever it is, the box is linked to your mother,” Bradwell tells Partridge. “It means something.”
Partridge looks at Pressia. “Our mother? How? And who is Fignan?”
“The box is Fignan, and when someone says swan,” Pressia begins, but she’s cut off by the box, which lights up and performs the ritual. “Seven, seven, seven . . .” Partridge is so surprised he bobbles the Black Box.
When it’s over, beeping and all, Pressia says, “He wants the names of the Seven. Do you remember them?”
“She didn’t tell us all of them,” Partridge says.
Lyda sees a thin metal arm unfold from the box’s body. It has a shiny, sharp tip on the end of it. “What’s that?”
The tip rears and quickly pierces the skin on Partridge’s wrist. A small dot of blood beads up. Partridge snatches Fignan’s arm and holds up the box like a rat by the tail. “What the hell was that?”
“It’s just his way of getting to know you,” Bradwell says.
“Like I needed that! Here.” Partridge hands him back to Bradwell and dabs the blood with his sleeve.
Lyda says, “What names do you have?” She leans in close, but not too close. She doesn’t want to get nipped.
“We’ve got Aribelle Cording, Willux, Hideki Imanaka,” Pressia says. “And there was the one who died young. We think his name might have been Novikov.”
“And Kelly,” Partridge says. “Bartrand Kelly and Avna Ghosh. I wrote everything down that I could remember my mother saying.”
“Kelly and Ghosh,” Pressia says.
“So that’s six. Who’s the seventh?” El Capitan asks. He looks shaken, ghostly pale. Is he sick? Fevered?
Pressia looks at Bradwell expectantly, her eyebrows raised. It’s as if she’s waiting for him to say a name—challenging him in some way. Lyda wonders what’s passed between them.
Bradwell looks down at his hands.
Pressia says, “It’s probably Art Walrond.”
“God, I hope it’s not Walrond. If he was in that deep with your father from the beginning,” Bradwell says to Partridge accusatorially, “it’ll kill me. Not Art. Not him.”
“Art,” Lyda says, thinking of the strange things Illia was saying about missing art. Lyda wonders if she misunderstood her. “I miss art or I miss Art?”
“What are you talking about?” Bradwell says.
“Illia. She said she’d like to die, but she hasn’t fulfilled her role.” Lyda stares at the box in Bradwell’s arms. “She told me a story about a man and a woman in love. He gave her the seed of truth to protect. After he died, she became the keeper of the truth. She had to marry someone who would survive the Detonations so that the seed could survive, and she can’t die until she gets it to the right person. She told me, I miss art. I thought she meant ‘art’ as in the beauty of things made. But what if she meant Art Walrond? She was the woman in the story. What if Art was the man? And Ingership was the man she married just to survive. What if the truth is in that Black Box?”
“Maybe she worked for the government-funded program, uploading the boxes with information. Maybe Art found her there . . .” Pressia says.
“And used her,” Bradwell says. “He was a womanizer.”
“No,” Lyda says, “they loved each other.”
“Does it matter?” Partridge says.
“It does to me. Remember in the farmhouse, Illia said that I reminded her of a boy she once knew?” Bradwell says.
“Maybe it wasn’t a boy like you,” Pressia says.
“Maybe it was me.” Bradwell sits down heavily Lyda doesn’t know much about Bradwell, but she can imagine what it would be like if there was no one left in the world who knew him before the Detonations—no one at all. It’s a kind of lonesomeness that you’d want to end. The birds on his back go still. “What truth?” he says. “What goddamn truth was she keeping for Art Walrond, huh?”
Pressia turns to Fignan. “Swan!”
Fignan lights up and says seven, seven times, and as he begins to beep, they all feed him names—Ellery Willux, Aribelle Cording, Ivan Novikov, Hideki Imanaka, Bartrand Kelly, Avna Ghosh. Fignan accepts each name with a green light.
“Arthur Walrond,” Bradwell says, finally.
And there’s the final green light. Wilda reaches out and holds Pressia’s hand.
They wait—for what? Lyda isn’t sure, but nothing happens. Fignan’s lights dull.
“That’s it?” Pressia says.
“What?” El Capitan says.
Helmud echoes him sadly
“No!” Bradwell says, shocked. “It’s not possible.”
“I guess it’s just a box,” Partridge says. “Maybe some of the past should just stay in the past.”
“I guess that makes sense coming from someone who survived in a nice little tidy bubble world,” Bradwell says, “all spruced up with a brand-new paint job and a sweet little school and your school pals and your doting girlfriend.”
“Shut up,” Partridge says. “I don’t need a lecture.”
“And I’m not a doting girlfriend,” Lyda says, clenching her jaw. Partridge looks at her. Has she surprised him? Part of her hopes she has. “We don’t have time to fig
ht,” El Capitan says.
“No,” Bradwell says, standing up and looming over Partridge. “It’s him! Fignan wouldn’t tell secrets in front of Willux’s son—not if someone on the inside programmed the box.”
“Maybe you’re giving Fignan a little too much credit,” Pressia says. “You think he knows who we are and who our parents are? That’s crazy.”
“No, it’s not,” Partridge says, looking at his wrist. “Fignan took a sample of my blood.”
“And he got a sample from me too,” Bradwell says. “My thumb.”
“He pulled my hair,” Pressia says, touching a few wispy strands.
Just then there are footsteps overhead.
“We might be getting very low on time,” El Capitan says.
Someone throws open the door to the tunnel and climbs down. It’s Mother Hestra. “They’re moving in.”
“Who?” El Capitan says. “Special Forces?”
She and Syden both nod. “Coming in fast too,” she says.
Partridge grabs the map. He pulls out one of his pencils. “Here,” he says, making an X on the map and drawing a line that leads deep into the medical center. He scrawls the number of fans in the system, the number of fan blades, the filter barriers, the intervals of time when they shut down—three minutes and forty-two seconds. “Lyda, tell ’em where you think the loading dock is.”
She’s not sure. “Here, I think. There was a hill, and I could see distant woods. So, wait—maybe here?”
“It’s okay,” Pressia says.
Bradwell gathers the maps. Footsteps pound overhead. Everyone looks up, as if they can see through the subway’s ceiling, the layers of dirt.
Lyda has to tell Partridge the truth: She can’t go back. She’d rather live out here in the wilds for the rest of her life and suffer than go back.
Partridge lifts his shirt. “These vials can’t come with me,” he says. He slowly and carefully unwraps them from his stomach. “They contain an ingredient I think my father already has, but still—I don’t want him to know we have it. Maybe it’ll help you. But be careful. The contents of these vials are a kind of cure. They can do miraculous things—rebuilding cells and all that. But they’re out of control.” He keeps them individually swaddled and hands them to Pressia. “She’d want you to have them.”